The Star.com Oct 28, 2007

Fantino: up close, personal — but giving no quarter

RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR

"I think it's fair to say that I had a real problem working with this group"

JULIAN FANTINO, referring to the police services board Excerpt from ex-chief's new book details testy times in Toronto with the post-Lastman regime:

Fantino's 11 commandments

After leaving the Toronto force in 2005, Julian Fantino chaired a task force on security and safety for the City of Vaughan. The resulting 11 recommendations, he writes in his book, can apply to any city.

1. Institute a Community Safety Committee to develop expertise in crime prevention and community safety.

2. Hire a full-time security co-ordinator to be the liaison for the mayor's office, task force and the Community Safety Committee, the police , school boards, and community groups.

3. Enhance community-based programs such as Neighbourhood Watch.

4. Enhance the capacity of bylaw enforcement officials, especially with regard to deterring vandalism and other disturbances which often involve youth.

5. Establish a public grow-op registry.

6. Enhance community safety and crime prevention through environmental or urban design (i.e., making sprinkler systems in residential homes mandatory).

7. Establish a community safety website to encourage citizen participation.

8. Encourage stronger relationships between neighbours (i.e., waive permit fees for events involving local ratepayers associations).

9. Undertake a comprehensive traffic safety study to look at the effectiveness of such things as stop signs, speed bumps, and inadequate parking facilities.

10. Designate as "drug-free zones" any area within a 300-metre radius of schools, parks, and other city-owned facilities.

11. Encourage city council to increase the presence of not-for-profit groups serving youth, seniors, and women.

From Duty: Life of a Cop, by Julian Fantino with Jerry Amernic. Copyright © 2007. Published by arrangement with Key Porter Books Limited.

In my career, I have been accused of being racist, of being homophobic, of conspiring against my fellow police officers, of accepting gratuities, and of being corrupt.

When you occupy a high-profile public office like that of police chief, some people are bound to take a few shots at you. Unfortunately, what they say can end up in print, on the radio, and on TV, even when none of it is true. People are free to file a statement of claim that may contain the most vicious lies. They can accuse you and members of your family of anything they want, and all they have to do to qualify it is say the allegations are not proven. But the damage gets done. In reality, such allegations are often nothing more than a media release. One thing I have learned is that, while some people might make a lot of noise and sue for a million dollars, they will gladly settle for two bucks.

During an interview I gave not long ago, the host said that I seem to have attracted a lot of enemies. I replied by saying that I didn't feel badly about that because these enemies are all the right kind. In any case, I have also attracted a much larger number of supporters, so I must have been doing something right.

I am seen as a law-and-order guy, which is fine with me. If a police chief – if any police officer – doesn't stand up for law and order, they should get another job. But in Canada, a police chief must report to the police services board, which in turn, reports to city council, and that's where politics can and often does come into the picture.

THE PEOPLE who hire you are invariably the people who will support you. I had the good fortune of spending most of my five years as police chief in Toronto working with a police board that included Toronto mayor Mel Lastman. All the people on that board were very demanding, but I always felt they were fair-minded and reasonable.

I always found [Lastman] to be decent, dedicated, hard-working, and fiercely loyal to Toronto. I don't think the city will ever have a better ambassador. He was also a mayor who felt very strongly about public safety, and law and order.

In 2002 and 2003, street gangs emerged as a growing problem in the city and I wanted to tackle it by forming a street-gang unit. The unit would involve officers who were dedicated to dealing exclusively with this issue, which had come about from groups protecting their respective drug-dealing territories.

I could see this problem developing and wanted to get ahead of the trend, but it meant adding resources at a time of severe fiscal constraints with the city budget which, of course, impacted the operating budget of the Toronto Police Service. The new street-gang unit would have 17 officers and wouldn't come cheap.

I went to Mayor Lastman with the idea, laid out the situation, and explained why I felt it was necessary, and he bought into it. It's true that, in 2005, Toronto saw a record number of gun-related homicides, many of them involving gangs. The media dubbed it the "summer of the gun." But I am sure the problem would have been much worse if we didn't have that street-gang unit in place.

After 9/11, Lastman was also very supportive of increasing funding to augment resources dedicated to the three major emergency services: police, fire, and Emergency Medical Services (EMS). And he was totally behind adding human resources dedicated to any counterterrorism intelligence work.

Believe me, the man was no pushover. He had to be convinced that whatever was being sought was the right thing to do, and he always paid close attention to the bottom line. But once he was onside, he was committed and passionate and was never afraid to take on other city councillors who just didn't get it. There is no question that he was a good mayor for the police and a good mayor for law and order. He was also very trustworthy.

In November 2003, Lastman retired and new municipal elections were held. The run-off for mayor wound up between businessman John Tory, who was just entering politics, and David Miller, who was already a member of council. During the campaign, there was a lot of talk about issues involving public safety and policing.

Long before that election, the Toronto police did a study on staffing levels and determined that, to effectively do the job, we were short by more than 400 officers. At the time, the Toronto Police Service had 5,250 officers in total. We needed more than 5,650. The Toronto Police Services Board approved the plan, but only if it were executed over a period of several years.

During the 2003 election campaign, John Tory picked up on this and said that the city would get 400 more police officers if he was elected mayor. Miller, on the other hand, said no to hiring more police officers. Shortly before the election, I was on CFRB radio, one of the city's most popular stations. The interviewer asked me, "Chief, can you use 400 more police officers?" and I said yes. This was interpreted by some in the media that I was supporting Tory for mayor, even though I had never said as much. Prior to the election, I didn't even know the man.

Meanwhile, I had been offered an extension of my contract as chief for another two years by the police services board. Then, after the election, which Miller won, the new police services board came in and the bantering began.

The day before the first meeting of the new board, which was now without Mel Lastman, the then chairman of the board, Alan Heisey, told me there would be no problem extending my contract for another two years. But the very next day – Dec. 11, 2003 – he told me the current board would not be honouring the earlier decision about my contract, and further, that the new mayor, David Miller, did not want to move forward on the extension.

IT WAS AROUND this time that a few Toronto police officers, who had been under investigation, were formally charged for alleged corrupt practices under Ontario's Police Services Act. In some cases, criminal charges were laid.

One day, the Lord Mayor of London, England, happened to be in the city and he and Miller were having a chat. Miller said to him, "Is your police force in jail? Mine is."

This was caught on a TV clip. I didn't see this live, but later that day when I went to the studios of Citytv to do my monthly show called The Chief, I was shown a tape of what Miller had said.

I was dumbfounded and had to watch it twice. They had me on camera and wanted a response. I certainly didn't want to attack the mayor, but at the same time, I was devastated by his comments, so I said I felt as if a stake had been driven through my heart. The police association representing the rank and file of the police service was very angry about Miller's comments. I spoke to the mayor the next day and recommended that he issue a letter of apology to the members of the Toronto Police Service, and he did.

Meanwhile, I had served notice to the new police services board that I wished to continue as chief, but there was a problem. At the time, the board, which previously had seven members on it, was down to six members. Miller chose not to be on it just yet and the province of Ontario was slow in appointing a seventh member which, by law, had to come from the provincial government. After being elected mayor, Miller had taken his seat on the Toronto Transit Commission board, which was responsible for the city's public transit system, and planned to come onto the police services board later.

The problem with the makeup of this police services board was that, of the six people who sat on it, three were pro-police and two were most definitely anti-police. These two, both from the left-leaning faction of city council, were appointed by Miller and attacked virtually everything we tried to do.

Alan Heisey, the chair of the police services board, tended to be more of a fence-sitter. However, it seemed that just about every time a vote was held, it wound up in a tie. Needless to say, three members were in favour of me continuing as chief and three were against. Eventually, Heisey, the chair, was forced to declare the board dysfunctional.

I think it's fair to say that I had a real problem working with this group. It was frustrating and really sapped my energy. But in spite of it all, the police force still retained its focus and remained very diligent about its duties and responsibilities.

These board members challenged just about everything that came forward, including my retaining (retired) judge (George) Ferguson for his report on police corruption, and budget requests.

Then, in the summer of 2004, the police services board decided not to renew my contract. No surprise there. But I still had my supporters on city council and they wanted to overturn that decision. This was rejected by a vote at city council, which I would describe as a body comprising two distinct groups with two distinct philosophies – the left-wingers and the right-wingers – and never the twain shall meet. Then my supporters created a protest movement with a "bring-back-the-chief" theme.

THE WHOLE THING got pretty ugly and became very much an "us-versus-them" kind of thing.

The Toronto Star, as always, never had anything good to say about me and neither did two alternative newsweeklies. These were NOW magazine, which had once published my home address with a map showing how to get there, and eye weekly, which is owned by Torstar Corporation, the parent company of the Toronto Star.

John Sewell, who was mayor of Toronto when (Constable) Michael Sweet was killed – and who didn't think enough of attending Sweet's funeral – was a regular writer for eye weekly and never hesitated to take shots at me and the police in general. He came out praising the police-bashers on the police services board, calling them "progressive," and on May 27, 2004, wrote a piece criticizing how we had virtually destroyed a street gang called the Malvern Crew in Scarborough in the city's east end.

The Malvern Crew was a violent gang that had been terrorizing the community. The takedown was the result of a 14-month investigation by our elite street-gang unit. More than 500 criminal charges were laid, with arrests not only in Scarborough, but also in three other municipalities – Ajax, Pickering, and Barrie – and it wasn't only the Toronto police who were involved, but also the York Regional Police Service, Peel Regional Police Service, RCMP, and OPP. This was a great success for the police and for the community. We arrested 65 members of the gang and effectively put them out of commission.

On the day of our press conference, we displayed the guns that had been seized and the only thing John Sewell could say about these guns in his article was that they hadn't all come from that gang. As if we were setting the whole thing up which, of course, was totally incorrect. Mind you, Sewell wasn't at the takedown, was he?

He also got in a few shots about corruption in the police department and –wouldn't you know it – made sure to refer to my time as chief in London, Ontario, when we were breaking up a child porn-pedophilia ring; he said that charges in that case had stuck against only two people. In fact, Project Scoop, which later became Project Guardian, resulted in the conviction of 61 accused, with a conviction rate of 86 per cent and an average sentence of four years.

On July 23, 2004, the Toronto Sun, a newspaper that was generally supportive of the police, ran a cartoon depicting Miller as Adolf Hitler after Miller had ruled that a motion calling on the police services board to reconsider my contract was out of order. The editor of the Sun later said in a column that he regretted running the cartoon. So emotions were running high.

I had been appointed chief of the Toronto police on March 6, 2000, and my last day on the job was five years later, on Feb. 28, 2005. I finished at 7 o'clock in the evening by attending a recognition event at Queen's Park, which is the site of the Ontario legislature, to honour police volunteers who had worked with the Red Cross. By that time I had already been offered the job of commissioner of emergency management for the province of Ontario. So there I was on the last day of what was then my 36-year career as a police officer.

It wasn't long after that – April 14, 2005 – when Mayor Miller presented me with the Key to the City. Strangely enough, that ceremony took place after a unanimous vote by Toronto Council that supported the presentation. The vote included those councillors who sat on the police services board and who had voted against my contract extension. But that is city politics.

Later that year, Miller announced that 150 new police officers would be hired for the Toronto Police Service, effectively going against what he had campaigned for in the earlier election campaign.

Still, David Miller and I got along professionally and were always cordial with each other. Some people like to think, and some media promoted the notion, that we were at odds, but that wasn't the case, at least as far as I was concerned. All the hype about the 400 new police officers and my allegedly supporting John Tory as mayor was sheer media-created sensationalism.

From Duty: Life of a Cop, by Julian Fantino with Jerry Amernic. Copyright © 2007. Published by arrangement with Key Porter Books Limited.